Rhythm & Roots Festival ready to roll in Charlestown

A cool wave of Canadian music is heading our way this weekend, thanks to the Rhythm & Roots Festival at Ninigret Park in Charlestown. Festival producer Chuck Wentworth has lined up his usual eclectic mix...

A cool wave of Canadian music is heading our way this weekend, thanks to the Rhythm & Roots Festival at Ninigret Park in Charlestown.

Festival producer Chuck Wentworth has lined up his usual eclectic mix, including the old-school soul of Charles Bradley, lots of great bluegrass, and plenty of Cajun and zydeco to keep the dance tents busy. There’s even a bluegrass/hip-hop hybrid called Gangstagrass.

The festival will also have a good-size contingent of Canadians. “It’s overwhelming, the amount of great music in Canada,” Wentworth said.

The festival’s “host band,” which will play on all three days, is The Duhks, which got its start in Winnipeg. Other musicians from our northern neighbors include fiddler Natalie MacMaster from Cape Breton, the 24th Street Wailers, Ten Strings and a Goatskin, Yves Lambert Trio and bluesman Matt Anderson.

Wentworth pointed out that Canada has a strong connection with both Rhode Island, thanks to the French-Canadians who migrated to the state to work in the mills, and Louisiana, where all that Cajun and zydeco comes from. (The Cajuns were originally Acadians, French-Canadians who were exiled from Canada by the British in the 18th century.)

The festival will present three days of music — Friday, Saturday and Sunday — on five stages. There will be three main stages for music, plus a workshop stage and a family stage, which will feature storytellers Marc Levitt and Len Cabral, a Mardi Gras parade, music from the Red-Tide Ramblers and more. (The Workshop and Family stages operate Saturday and Sunday.)

This is a heavily dance-centric festival, and each of the main music stages has a place set aside for dancing nearby. “We want to keep the dancers happy,” Wentworth said. “That’s our core audience.”

The Duhks, founded in 2001, draws from a mix of musical traditions — gospel, old-time string music, Cajun, folk, Celtic. There have been a series of personnel changes over the years, and in 2010 the band (mostly) came off the road.

But last year The Duhks re-formed with original members Leonard Podolak and Jessee Havey, plus three new members.

Havey said Rhythm & Roots is one of her favorite festivals, and she’s excited this year to be part of the Canadian contingent that will be performing. (She and Podolak grew up at the Winnipeg Folk Festival, which Podolak’s parents started.)

Oddly, she said, The Duhks don’t play in Canada much. “I think we’re more popular in the U.S. than we are in Canada,” she said.

One of Wentworth’s goals at the festival is to introduce new music to the festival’s audience, without abandoning old favorites. (It wouldn’t be a Rhythm & Roots Festival, for example, without standout Cajun band Steve Riley & the Mamou Playboys.)

And the festival will be celebrating the 25th anniversary of Donna the Buffalo, a perennial festival favorite even though the band includes neither a Donna nor a buffalo.

“We’re looking for variety — there’s a huge span in the world of roots music,” Wentworth said. “There really are no boundaries. We want to get as many quality new bands in there as possible,” Wentworth said.

New to the Rhythm & Roots Festival this year is soul singer Charles Bradley, “The Screaming Eagle of Soul,” who labored in relative obscurity until he was discovered by Daptone Records while working in New York.

Bradley said he’s been singing since he was 14, when his sister took him to a James Brown concert.

Bradley’s bios say he was performing as a James Brown imitator. Bradley said he admires Brown — the sound, the band — but added he was not an imitator. “He came from the same place I did, a rough hard life,” Bradley said.

Now 65, with two albums under his belt, Bradley described his late-blooming career as “bittersweet.”

“It was a long time coming, but I’m enjoying it,” he said. “I love the people who are enjoying my music… I believe in looking for the truth within myself, and I find a way to put it to music. I’ve got a lot of things inside me, and I let them come out naturally.”

While his first album, “No Time for Dreaming,” was dark — “Like coming out of the storm” — the more recent “Victim of Love” finds Bradley starting to open up emotionally.

Wentworth said he put Bradley on the Rhythm & Roots bill partly to add to the Festival’s diversity, but more importantly because he puts on a great show.

The Rhythm & Roots Festival takes place Friday, Saturday and Sunday at Ninigret Park in Charlestown. Music begins at 4 p.m. Friday, noon Saturday and Sunday. Tickets are $165 for the full festival, $45 for Friday, $65 each for Saturday and Sunday. For information and to purchase tickets, go to rhythmandroots.com. To order by phone, call (888) 855-6940 or (315) 738-0356.